The Making of The Singing Wilderness

The Singing Wilderness, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1956, is a classic of twentieth century nature writing. But for Sigurd Olson, getting his first book written and published was a long journey that depended not only on talent, but persistence, help, and a little bit of luck.The narrative below, an excerpt from A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson, tells the story from 1952, when Sigurd first began thinking about the book, until just before its publication in April 1956.

Here's the excerpt:

That summer [of 1952] Sigurd resurrected an idea he had first thought of in the 1930s: he would write interpretive essays incorporating the joy and wonder that he felt in the outdoors, his experiences of connectedness with all life and the whole universe, and put them together in book form. "If people reading it can catch that then it is enough," he wrote on August 9, "then everything you write will have a solid core of worthwhileness."

But summer passed into fall, and the mallard-filled marshes near home occupied much of Sigurd's relatively little free time from conservation work. Before long the first white flakes of winter drifted quietly down, and Sigurd's idea once more seemed to fade away like the grass and pine needles on the snow-covered ground outside his writing shack. [To read Sigurd's related journal entries from this period, click here .]

Olson's January thaw arrived in the person of his younger son's wife, Yvonne. She and Robert came from San Francisco for a holiday visit, and Yvonne stayed over for another month. She and Robert had been married for nearly six years, but had spent little time in Ely, and to Sigurd it seemed as though he was really getting to meet Yvonne for the first time. She quickly won his heart.

"I can't tell you how much this month has meant to us in fun and laughter and music and poetry and companionship," Sigurd wrote to Robert on February 10, 1953, the day Yvonne left for home. "Your Vonnie has a beautiful mind. Her sense of awareness, understanding, wit and appreciation are something precious....What I am trying to tell you clumsily is that we love your Vonnie very much and always will and so shall always bless you for finding her."

Sigurd found in Yvonne what he had never found in Elizabeth or in any of his friends in Ely: someone who read and enjoyed discussing articles, poems, and books about the human condition. It was a release for him, and possibly a relief, to have someone he could talk to about the search for meaning, that driving force of his life which few seemed to understand. And Yvonne had two other qualities Sigurd greatly admired. One was her assertiveness: she was quite willing to tell him off when he needed it. ("He loved it," Robert recalled. "Everybody else would hunker down. She wasn't being brow-beaten by him.") The other was her sense of humor which, just as with Sigurd, included a silly streak. ("In fact," Yvonne recalled with a smile, "he could be downright childish. When he'd get on something he thought was funny he'd repeat it to the point where it was worn out.")

After her visit to Ely, Yvonne and Sigurd wrote to each other frequently, addressing each other with nicknames based on a popular song: Sigurd was "Papa Mia," and Yvonne was "Vonnie Mia." They would mark up and exchange articles from magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Review, and would write their thoughts about things they were reading. Sigurd tried to convince Yvonne about the value of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and she tried to persuade him to give T.S. Eliot a chance. They wrote about Jacques Maritain and John Masefield and Ryo Nen, about Thoreau and Goethe. Through Yvonne, Sigurd belatedly discovered that Robert shared his philosophical and cultural interests, and he began opening up intellectually to his son as well. The three even started a joint collection of classical music recordings. (At the time, Sigurd especially enjoyed clarinette quintettes.)

At some point in 1953, possibly during Yvonne's visit in January, Sigurd talked about his own writing. Yvonne had never read any of his essays, and asked him to show her some. He went into his writing shack, pulled out a few of the essays, and gave them to her. She thought they were wonderful, and told him he should put them into a book.

Coming from another family member or close friend, such a remark might not have had much impact--of course they're going to praise the work--but Yvonne's intellectual interests and respect for writing gave her enthusiastic response more weight. Sigurd took it to heart, and during 1953--the year of his father's death, the year of the FBI raid on the canoe country, the year of Sigurd's induction as president of the National Parks Association and of his month-long summertime swing through the West, and the year of his first canoe trip with the Voyageurs--he quietly began writing a book manuscript. [To read Sigurd's related journal entries from this period, click here .] On January 16, 1954, a bitterly cold day that by night would reach nearly forty degrees below zero, leading to a broken furnace, a frozen pipe and a blown stove fuse, Sigurd cheerfully confessed the truth to Yvonne:

Yes I am working on a book and it will be finished sometime in 1954 and I AM NOT COPYING STUFF OUT OF A OTHER BOOK SEE. I am writing one of my own and next summer if you are here I want you to help me make clean copies of the rough MSS so that we can submit it somewhere in the fall. It is a compilation of essays I have written and now in the light of my mature knowledge (I hope) rather drastically rewritten. I have written some new ones and made a lot of additions to the old ones....I have been working on it steadily since I got home and have some 20 chapters taking shape. [To see more of this letter, and related material, click here.]

Yvonne Olson arrived in Ely early in May 1954, to spend the summer. (She and Robert were in transition; he was in Minneapolis, looking for a place for them to live and beginning a doctoral program in history at the University of Minnesota.) While a crew of carpenters sawed and hammered away, adding an enclosed porch to the house, Yvonne pounded the typewriter, making fresh copies of Sigurd's essays.

By June, the manuscript was far enough along to submit a portion of it. While he was in Washington, D.C. on National Parks Assocation business, Sigurd sought advice from his friend and workplace neighbor, Howard Zahniser [pictured at left]. The balding and bespectacled Wilderness Society executive secretary not only looked bookish, he was bookish. He had a huge personal library of nature books, and rarely seemed to be without one. Ted Swem, a Park Service official and eventual Wilderness Society president who came to know Zahniser early in the 1960s, recalled a time in Denver when he was supposed to pick up Zahniser outside of a downtown hotel. Zahniser was sitting on the sidewalk with his back resting against the hotel wall, and was so immersed in a book that he didn't notice Swem or look up when Swem honked his car horn. Swem had to drive around the block three times before he caught Zahniser's attention. Seven years younger than Sigurd and a quiet, gentle, and tremendously effective conservationist, Zahniser was a perfect person for the kind of advice Sigurd needed.

"Have just finished talking to Zahnie about the book," Sigurd wrote afterward to family members. "He is enthusiastic and thinks it might go big....He thinks it might be best to contact a good agent, because an agent can best decide the question of pre-book publication of chapters and can place them where they will do the most good as a sort of advance publicity stunt." Zahniser recommended Marie Rodell [shown at right], a widely respected New York agent who, he said, had done great promotional work for scientist/nature writers Rachel Carson and Durwood Allen. On June 10, Olson sent the introduction, four sample chapters, and the table of contents to Rodell. "These essays and sketches...might be the answer for many to the gnawing ennui of today," he wrote. "If they can bring some joy to those who seem to have lost their capacity to see the world of nature in a fresh, clear light, the book will be justified." Using words from a poem by Oscar Fay Adams, he called the book "The Pipes of Pan."

Rodell was interested, but brought up an issue raised by others over the years. "There are some very pleasant passages in this sample material," she responded on June 16, but she wondered how much of the final version would be lively anecdotes, and how much would contain "straight lyrical appreciation." She said that Olson's wilderness adventures would interest readers more than "the more abstract pages of philosophy and feeling." [To read this and other letters related to Olson's first contacts with Marie Rodell, click here.]

But Olson was not about to back down. For twenty years agents and editors had told him there was no market for his essays, but after six years of traveling the country as a professional conservationist, he was convinced they were wrong. Too many people had come up to him after his speeches and told him how much they enjoyed his discussions of the spiritual values of wilderness. By this time Yvonne had typed and retyped all of the essays (she later said she and her father-in-law had some "royal battles" over punctuation) and Sigurd sent the rest of the manuscript to Rodell, saying:

There are many books of adventure and factual accounts of observations in the out of doors. It was not my wish to do another. The value of my book as I see it is in my interpretation of the wilderness, its meaning, and my reactions to it....You may not agree with me at all but I feel very strongly about this.

Rodell read the rest of Olson's manuscript, and on July 13, 1954 said she wanted to try to sell it. "I'm not at all certain of the sort of reception it will get," she wrote, "since the essay type of writing is not too popular these days; but let's try and see what we can do."

Later in Olson's life, the myth would develop--a myth he encouraged--that his manuscript was rejected by eight, even ten publishers. His own papers and Rodell's files document just three, and the timing is such that other undocumented rejections seem extremely unlikely. But that doesn't mean it wasn't painful. Dodd, Mead said little in its rejection, the first of the three. George Brockway, however, writing for W.W. Norton & Co. on October 29, 1954, called the book "too diffuse, too self-conscious, and too sentimental." And Paul Brooks, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, wrote a rejection letter to Rodell on November 23 that was difficult for both him and Sigurd, because they were friends:

Of course I'm wholly sympathetic with the philosophy expressed in [the essays]--and sometimes he expresses it very well. However, as I told him, there is nothing tougher to sell than essays collected in book form....It would have to be superbly written to have a chance, and Sig Olson's prose is not on that level....Sig is a wonderful man and I hope to see more of him. But we'd all be disappointed if we tried to publish this. [To see this letter and the ones mentioned in the next paragraph, click here.]

Rodell forwarded Brooks' letter to Olson, who had just returned to Ely from New York, where he had played a key role in the conference that re-united conservationists in their strategy to fight the proposed Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument. [For more on that conference and issue, click here.] But the sting of the new rejection was lessened somewhat by a letter Olson had just received from Alfred Knopf [shown at right]. The prestigious publisher and conservationist--he was a member of the National Park Service's advisory board--told Olson he had attended Sigurd's keynote speech at the New York conference, and was greatly impressed. "I am wondering if you are not going to have a book for us one of these days?" Knopf wrote. Olson wrote to Rodell on November 29, enclosing Knopf's letter and asking if she was getting pessimistic about the book's chances. "If you are, I don't blame you," he wrote. "Perhaps Alfred Knopf will in a moment of weakness decide to take a gambling chance."

He did. "I don't know how much success we will have with such a book," Knopf wrote to Olson on January 6, 1955, "but I am happy to have it on our list." Rodell worked out the contract details. Knopf wanted Olson to change the title and accomanying "pipes of pan" theme in the introduction, to regroup the essays in a more cohesive fashion (such as by season), and to write half a dozen or so additional essays. He agreed with Olson's request to use Francis Lee Jaques as the book's illustrator, but the cost for the black-and-white sketches--which would receive praise in the years ahead--was to come out of Olson's royalties. Rodell later convinced the publisher to split the illustration costs after--and if--the book sold eight thousand copies in the United States.

Sigurd set to work in his writing shack, sketching out new essays. He had liked the "pipes of pan" theme; the metaphor of music and wilderness strongly resonated with him. In fact, his original title choice in 1952 was "Wilderness Music." Perhaps his decision to use the metaphor as a theme for his first book arose from his reading of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, which he had received as a gift in 1950. In the essay, "Song of the Gavilan," Leopold wrote, "This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills....a vast pulsing harmony--its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries."

Then again, the idea could have arisen from an essay called "Wilderness Symphony," which Olson edited for the Summer 1951 issue of North Country. We may never know for sure, but that essay, by Sigurd's friend Sam Campbell [shown at right], must have stirred Olson: "Who can write the symphony of the wilderness?" Cambell began. "What master can catch that elusive melody to whose rhythm all nature moves? Who can gather into notes and measures the song of the forest, the cyclic tides of verdure, the dance of the hills and mountains, the metric march of the seasons?" [For more on Sam Campbell, go to samcampbell.com.] Olson had long believed he was that person, and in 1952, as he began thinking seriously about writing a book, his journal entries once again raised the theme of his uniqueness. On July 6, for example, he wrote, "You have something different--no one in your acquaintance feels as you do--no one at all." And on October 25, he said, "You are a poet. That is where your power lies....You are emerging as a poet of the out-of-doors."

By early February, 1955, Olson had decided on a new way to express the metaphor of wilderness music that would please Alfred Knopf. The idea came from Jean Packard, a good friend whose husband, Fred, served as executive secretary of the National Parks Association. She told Sigurd of a book about John James Audubon that had been written by nature writer Donald Culross Peattie. Published in 1935, it was called Singing in the Wilderness. Olson liked the title so much he decided to use a variation of it for his own manuscript. On February 7, he sat down at the desk in his writing shack, put a sheet of canary yellow paper in his manual Royal typewriter, and began a new introduction: "The Singing Wilderness has to do with perspective, a certain element of timelessness, and the need for tranquility. It is an open challenge to mechanization, to unlimited industrial expansion and the striving for material things." The introduction would go through a number of rewrites before he was happy with it, but he had found his metaphor and his new title: The Singing Wilderness.

Olson soon began writing new essays for the book, typing them out on legal-sized, lined yellow paper. He quickly wrote drafts of such essays as "Loons of Lac La Croix" and "The Last Mallard," "Birds of the Ski Trails" and "Scrub Oak." But he did not write free of distraction. Minnesota conservationists were campaigning to get Governor Orville Freeman to name Olson as the state's conservation commissioner, and Freeman was interested. On January 6 the Minneapolis Tribune listed Olson as one of four contenders. Sigurd was gratified by the attention. "In fact after some of the brutal criticism that came my way during the Air Ban fight, it warms the cockles of my heart," he wrote to a friend. And it would be incorrect to say he had no interest. He told another friend he would have liked to have been able to at least consider it. But he knew he had far too many other things to do, and told those who were leading the campaign on his behalf that he could not accept the position if it were offered.

One of the chapters for The Singing Wilderness added an ironic epilogue to this distraction from his writing. When Marie Rodell had sent the book manuscript to publishers in 1954, she also had sent individual chapters to magazines, and Sports Illustrated had bought two of them. One, called "Dark House," the magazine renamed "Fishing at 20 Below," and published on February 28, 1955. The article was not about ordinary ice fishing; Olson wrote about spearing, which had long been controversial among Minnesota sportsmen. Those in the northern part of the state typically had supported it; those in the southern counties often had vigorously opposed it. Within the state division of the Izaak Walton League the issue had created such dissension in the late 1940s that the northern chapters had threatened to secede.

A number of biologists in the Minnesota Conservation Department opposed spearing, saying that northern pike would disappear from the state if the practice continued. After the Sports Illustrated article appeared, state Izaak Walton League President George Laing wrote to Olson that his article had resurrected old wounds, and that Twin Cities outdoor writers "have actually pointed to your article as evidence of your disinterest in the state's complete conservation program." To such critics, "Fishing at 20 Below" demonstrated that Olson was unfit for the job of conservation commissioner.

Sigurd responded on March 24 that he simply hadn't thought about the potential reaction when he submitted the article: "I guess the fact of the matter is that I have become so embroiled in controversial problems all over the country that I had forgotten how it might affect the Minnesota issue." He said he was willing to "accept the opinions of those who know the score," the researchers who believed spearing must end to save the northern pike.

It was a minor storm that quickly passed, but it is surprising that Olson, the Izaak Walton League's wilderness ecologist and active in the organization since its inception three decades earlier, would be so unaware of an issue that deeply divided the league in his own state. Perhaps the outdoor writers that Laing referred to were correct, if by "disinterested" they meant that Olson had become so involved in conservation at a national level that he was losing touch with state issues. His response to Laing gives some support to such a charge.

Another possibility--and it would not necessarily preclude the above--is that Olson tended to separate his creative desires as a writer and interpreter of outdoor experiences from the political aspects of the conservation world. In his March 24 letter to Laing, Sigurd wrote that he didn't write the essay to give support to spearing: "I wrote this little piece some years ago as a pure interpretation of the feelings of a man when he sits in a dark house and looks down through a hole in the ice waiting for something to come along. I still think it is a wonderful experience....And so I make no apologies for the way I feel about it and the joys I tried to point up in my story."

The controversy did not keep Olson from using the essay in The Singing Wilderness under its original title, "Dark House." He made but one significant change in the story: in the first sentence, he changed the timing of the episode from "two years ago" to "ten years ago," undoubtedly to distance himself somewhat from charges of supporting the practice in the mid-1950s.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1955 Sigurd continued working on the book as much as possible, while keeping up with his conservation duties. He also made time for his first canoe expedition into the far north, the publicity-generating Voyageurs trip along five hundred miles of the Churchill River in Saskatchewan. [For more on that expedition, click here.] It fulfilled a dream Olson had kept since 1921, when Al Kennedy had asked him to go prospect for gold in the Flin Flon, and Sigurd had said no to keep from losing Elizabeth. He thought about that on July 23, after the group made its first camp on a sand point along the northern reaches of Lac Ile a la Crosse. He wrote in his "Thistle Irish Linen" notebook, "Here at last I am in the North Country, where I wanted to go thirty years ago. It is good to have seen it--good at last to have part of it under my belt."

Returning from the north in mid-August, Olson finished his manuscript and sent it to his editor. The final draft contained thirty-four essays, organized by seasons. At least nineteen of the essays were rewrites of pieces dating back ten years or more, many of them rejected by magazines. Three of them--"Easter on the Prairie," "Grandmother's Trout," and "Farewell to Saganaga"--had their origins in the 1930s, and shared a total of eighteen rejections. But whatever Alfred Knopf's original reservations were, he took a personal interest in the book, and on February 13, 1956, after reading the final draft, he wrote to Sigurd, "I think you have done a fine job."

To go back to the table of contents page for items relating to The Singing Wilderness, click here.